RICHMOND, Calif. — “His body was there,” Sam Vaughn, an outreach worker for Operation Peacemaker in Richmond, Calif., said last week. “Right there.”
He pointed to a spot on the asphalt parking lot, fronting the Kennedy Manor apartment complex on Richmond’s south side, where blood spilled on July 14.
Three gunmen burst onto the parking lot and lit it up. When the shooting stopped, a 29-year-old college graduate, Fontino Hardy, Jr., who was visiting friends and family, was dead. A stray bullet ripped through the red flowers on the balcony of an upper-level apartment, landing on an inside wall, inches from a 1-year-old girl’s head.
It was another senseless killing in the free-fire zone of urban America, maybe an indiscriminate retaliatory hit in a decades-old beef that caught Mr. Hardy in the cross-fire. It happens in cities across the country, including Toledo, every day.
But Vaughn, 38, and his partner, James Houston, 41, another Operation Peacemaker outreach worker — otherwise called neighborhood change agent — weren’t here to relive another homicide. The graduates of San Quentin State Prison were trying to stop the bleeding by reaching another shooter.
They left their gray Ford Fusion to shake hands with a new recruit in their fight against gun violence: 17-year-old Tykire Sykes, a lanky kid dressed in loose jeans and a white T-shirt. He looked like a typical teen, but the street team had identified him as a shooter, or potential shooter, and enrolled him in an intense mentoring program that includes cash incentives for putting down his gun and avoiding other criminal behavior.
At the core, Operation Peacemaker, part of Richmond’s Office of Neighborhood Safety, recognizes that the city’s most lethal young men are not only the problem, but also the solution. Cross-eyed critics might call the initiative “hug-a-thug,” but it works. After the program’s first three years, homicides in Richmond dropped last year to their lowest level in more than 40 years.
“These young men — not us — are responsible for reducing the gun violence in Richmond,” DeVone Boggan, Operation Peacemaker's founder and the director of Richmond's Office of Neighborhood Safety, told me. “They have to make daily decisions to negotiate terrible conflicts that may be generations old. Their voices need to be part of the equation.”
The headline for Operation Peacemaker, which started in 2010, is that it pays shooters to stop shooting. That’s only a small part of the story.
Maybe the most important thing to know about Operation Peacemaker is that it works in Richmond — a working-class and increasingly impoverished city 17 miles northeast of San Francisco — and it can work in Toledo. Or any other American city.
This week, Mr. Boggan will visit Toledo to talk to Lucas County Sheriff John Tharp, Mayor Paula Hicks-Hudson, Police Chief George Kral, Prosecutor Julia Bates, judges, and others about starting a similar program here. Sheriff Tharp invited Mr. Boggan to Toledo after reading his Sunday New York Times essay in July.
“I’m open to anything that reduces gun violence,'' Sheriff Tharp told me Thursday. “We need to try something different.”
A new approach
Operation Peacemaker evolved from other efforts, including Boston’s Operation Ceasefire and the Cure Violence community outreach program in Chicago, founded by epidemiologist Gary Slutkin.
All of these programs, rightly, view violence as a public-health problem. Operation Peacemaker seeks to inoculate the carriers of this infectious disease — now. Gun violence is too noxious to wait until society finally fixes the structural and underlying causes, including poverty, lack of opportunity, and lousy schools.
“One of the reasons that we’ve been successful is that we have a very narrow focus,” Mr. Boggan said.
Like Vaughn and Houston, most outreach workers are ex-prisoners whose names are still known on the street. Both men caught Mr. Boggan’s attention while they were in San Quentin, leading self-help groups for other prisoners.
Violence, trauma, and pain are normal for these young men, said Houston, who recalled his own childhood anguish about not being able to defend his mother from his violent father.
“Many of our young people feel less-than,” said Houston, who was incarcerated for 18 years for murder before getting paroled in 2013. “Everything they see tells them they’re less important. So they get a gun to compensate.
“When they take someone’s life or shoot someone, they get name recognition, respect. Younger people feel safe or protected around them. So they feel important.”
In 2010, Mr. Boggan heard a statistic from Richmond police that blew his mind: 70 percent of the city's shootings and homicides during the previous year were caused by just 17 people, mostly African-American and Latino men, ages 16 to 25. Usually, their victims looked like them.
That’s not surprising. In practically any major city, a small number of people do most of the shooting. In a smaller city like Toledo, they might number 30 or 40.
Forget about scaring these young cats with tough talk and tougher sentences. They don’t expect to get caught — and often they’re right. In most large cities, many — if not most — homicides go unsolved. Some of these young men don’t expect to live until their next birthday.
Mr. Boggan decided that, to reduce gun violence in Richmond, he needed to reach the few who were perpetuating most of it. To identify those most likely to shoot or get shot, he used street-savvy outreach workers to comb high-crime neighborhoods and build relationships of trust.
After 25 of the city’s most lethal shooters were identified and engaged, Mr. Boggan invited them to a sit-down in the city manager’s office in 2010. Twenty-one of the 25 came, based on the word of outreach workers that they weren't walking into a police sting. Surprised, the young men entered a room with name cards and catered pasta Siena, pesto prawns, garlic bread, salad, fruit, and cheesecake.
“I treated them like VIPs,” Mr. Boggan said.
In exchange for peace, Mr. Boggan offered them 15-month fellowships that included cash incentives of up to $1,000 a month, for a maximum of nine months. (Most fellows receive $300 to $700 a month, depending on how well they participate and meet goals. )
Then, to seal the deal, Mr. Boggan did something startling. As the young men filed out, he asked them to step back into the room. He said he had forgotten something.
Groaning, the young men sat down, figuring it was a set-up, after all. Then Mr. Boggan handed them each a sealed envelope with a $1,000 check.
“I gave away $21,000 that day,” he told me. “It meant I was serious. I told them this was the beginning of a covenant of trust.”
Since then, new classes of fellows have been identified regularly, typically every 18 months. In the beginning, the program focused on males 16 to 25. Now, fellows are generally younger, 15 to 21.
To get the stipends, fellows are expected, with staff help, to meet “life plan” goals, such as getting a driver’s license, earning a GED, finishing high school, saving money in a bank account, getting substance abuse treatment if needed, and finding and holding a job.
The tab to taxpayers for the average U.S. homicide, including medical and criminal justice costs, averages $400,000. So the stipends, which cost the office about $70,000 a year, are chump change.
Still, for political reasons, the Office of Neighborhood Safety, which receives about $1.3 million a year from the city, funds its fellowship stipends entirely through private donors. Donors and foundations also fund travel, clothing, and other activities for fellows.
Enrolling — or completing — an Operation Peacemaker fellowship is a not a get-out-of-jail-free card. With new evidence, any fellow could be prosecuted for a prior offense.
For Mr. Boggan, 47, a dapper ex-consultant from Oakland who wears a stingy-brim black and white houndstooth fedora, Operation Peacemaker is a mission and a calling. He envisions the program as a national movement, maybe an urban Peace Corps, funded by innovative social impact bonds.
Mr. Boggan can sound almost academic and then, with a preacher’s cadence, shift into the vernacular of the street. But his passion for this work remains constant. The program has had a few critics, including one former member of Richmond City Council who questioned its effectiveness. So far, however, the facts are on Mr. Boggan's side.
With just over 100,000 residents, Richmond was rated one of the nation’s 10 most dangerous cities in 2007, with a per-capita homicide rate close to Detroit’s. In its first year, Operation Peacemaker cut — or helped cut — the city's homicides in half: to 22 from 45. Firearms assaults also dropped in similar measure.
“It’s a lot quieter around here now,” Carl Townsend, 51, a resident of Richmond's south side, told me. Mr. Townsend credits Houston’s daily visits and mentoring for improving neighborhood safety.
Last month, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency released an independent evaluation that tracked the 68 fellows enrolled from 2010 to 2014. It found that 94 percent were still alive, 84 percent had not suffered a gun-related injury, and nearly 80 percent had not been arrested or charged with a gun-related activity since becoming a fellow. The NCCD report also noted that fellows regard staff members as family.
Getting out
Becoming an Operation Peacemaker fellow entails risks — from both sides.
Richmond Police Chief Chris Magnus speaks respectfully about the program. (Operation Peacemaker does not share information about its clients with the police.) Even so, outreach workers told me that they and their clients have occasionally been targets for police harassment.
On the flip side, working with the Office of Neighborhood Safety can make young men suspect among their peers, who might think that fellows have become narcs, or police informants.
Life was as dangerous for Eric Welch after he became a fellow in 2011 as it was before. He has been shot four times — twice after becoming a fellow. Getting shot for the first time at 16 “spun me out of control,” he said.
In 2010, Eric, now 26, was locked up on firearms and “street terrorism” charges. In the beginning, he, too, was leery about Operation Peacemaker and the Office of Neighborhood Safety.
“We really didn’t know what to expect,” he told me. “At first, it was like, are you the police? Are you just trying to get information out of us?
“After a while, I found out what the program was really about.”
The fellowship showed him respect. So when staff members talked, he listened. They weren't Bill O'Reilly or Bill Cosby, wagging a withered finger. They were down for him, even when they called him out. They cared about his future.
Through the fellowship, Eric traveled to other cities and countries, including New York, San Antonio, London, and Paris, often speaking at conferences on youth and criminal justice . Fellows have also traveled to South Africa and Mexico.
When he traveled, Eric dined at nice restaurants. The fellowship also provided money to buy a sharp suit for speaking engagements. With the help of the program, Eric secured a summer internship with the Campaign for Youth Justice in Washington.
“It opened my eyes to so many different things,” Eric told me. “Just being able to see something different made a difference. You learn there’s more to life than your own neighborhood and what you see everyday here.”
He called the fellowship stipend a motivator. “It was cool because I really needed it.”
Eric finished the fellowship in 2013. He’s now an ambassador for the program and will start college this fall at Florida A&M University. He plans to study public policy and juvenile justice.
On the day I left Richmond, I ran into Eric at the Oakland airport, where he caught a flight to Florida. I heard someone say, “Toledo” and turned to see Eric, smiling. We went through the security gate together and walked to his gate.
He told me about a tearful farewell with his mother. “I'm going to be homesick,” he said. No longer one of Richmond’s notorious shooters, he was an excited young man headed to college, ready to make a difference. He told me he wanted to come to Toledo to help the city set up a program similar to Operation Peacemaker. “It's a way to give back,” he said.
Seeing a future
Whether 17-year-old Tykire Sykes, the new fellow whom outreach workers met at Kennedy Manor, will make a similar change is still uncertain. But since becoming a fellow in March, he has stayed out of trouble and fulfilled his first life plan goal: finishing high school. Next up is getting a driver’s license and a job.
I asked Tykire what he wanted to be doing in five or 10 years. The question ricocheted into a dead zone. He’ll figure it out as he works through his life plan, he said. Now at least he sees a future. Operation Peacemaker is his best chance of not becoming another statistic.
Nearby, a young man in a navy polo shirt wore a necklace of photos of the slain Fontino Hardy, Jr. The pictures showed a smiling, handsome young man, growing through his years in elementary school, high school, college.
Another brother gone.
Whether cities around the country, including Toledo, can slow the bleeding will depend more on young men like Eric and Tykire than on the police.
After five homicides in one week this month, Toledo Police Chief George Kral called a town hall meeting and more than 100 people showed. Toledo has not become inured to violence.
But the ideas floated at the University of Toledo gathering, such as focusing more policing on gangs, were stale. We can’t keep doing the same things and expect different results. And we can’t engage the young men who are doing most of the shooting if we continue to fear and demonize them.
“Lot of folks want to help urban America,” Vaughn told me. “But they don’t want to help the people in urban America.”
Not every shooter can be reached. A few will continue to shoot until they kill, get killed, or waste their lives in prison. But most, given a meaningful alternative, opportunities to grow, and coaching and mentoring from people they trust and respect, can turn the corner.
When DeVone Boggan comes to town this week, Toledo’s shotcallers need to listen with an open mind.
Toledo can either continue the same strategies and watch the senseless shootings and killings go on, or it can try to engage and change the young men responsible for much of the carnage and, in doing so, transform this city.
Jeff Gerritt is deputy editorial page editor of The Blade. Contact him at: jgerritt@theblade.com, 419-724-6467, or follow him on Twitter @jeffgerritt.
First Published August 30, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
